Finding the Patient within: Managing the Transitions from Student Nurse, to Patient, to Nurse Therapist

Abstract

The author recounts elements in her stay at a Therapeutic Community that enabled her as a mental health nursing student, to overcome resistance to acknowledging her own vulnerabilities. Reflecting on that experience, she identifies the qualities that professionals who experience `life on the other side' may emerge with, and the resultant benefits. The author focuses, finally, on her struggle to integrate the experience of having been labelled with severe psychopathology into her sense of self as she moves along a career path through the role of Nurse Therapist and on to group-analytic training, addressing the need for a more inclusive approach to validating such personal experience as something that might valuably inform clinical practice.